Tonight At The Arizona

Album review

Perhaps the best way to describe Upstate New York's Felice Brothers is that they are a cross between Vincent Gallo and the Band; that is, they simultaneously ooze a sort of unwashed hipster sleaze (they are proudly self-professed "scumbags") and authentic, otherworldly Americana. As to the music on Tonight at the Arizona, it is the real deal -- in spades. Theirs is a new-millennium slant on the kind of poetical, fractured prism of America that critic Greil Marcus once exalted over in describing Bob Dylan and the Band. (The Felice's inhabit the same region of the Hudson Valley that is steeped in those artists' myths, and the cover of this album clearly echoes the Band.) This music sounds descended from ancient tradition, but also crosses contemporary concerns and an über-literary consciousness. (In fact, drummer Simone Felice is a heralded novelist.) "The Ballad of Lou the Welterweight" begins by wheezing along on a wistful accordion line, signaling an historical plunge, then the narrative, spun out on quavering vocals, tells of the noble Lou's terrible demise in the ring at the hands of a brutish competitor ("a big dumb kid from Flushing"), inter-cutting it with his inner life, in which he yearns for his lover in the stands as he drifts to the canvas and into painful oblivion. But the Felice Brothers can't play a romantic tale straight or sentimental, and the refrain goes for the loins in a discomfiting manner: "Powder your nose/Pull down your pantyhose/Let me love you from behind/my darling/Powder your nose/Put on your pantyhose/We're going down to my bout/my darling." The repeated line becomes a sort of internal mantra for the boxer. As the song proceeds and Lou (and all that he represents) slowly fades away, all that seems left of him is his love and lust as his strength and power expire. It is beautiful and inappropriate at once, which is exactly the rub with the Felice Brothers. "Rockefeller Druglaw Blues" is straight-out Dylan, even in vocal intonation. It doesn't try to be anything else. (It refers to the Draconian drug laws in New York State, wherein someone can go away for a long time for a relatively small stash.) But the Felice's handling of the material is so perfect that one wonders why no one has written a folk song about this topic before: "Rockefeller, Rockefeller, that's a long old time" croons Ian Felice his vowels flattening into a Dylanesque apocalyptic whine as his narrator enters the land of orange jump suits. In the prologue to his book Mystery Train, Greil Marcus quotes the literary critic Leslie Fielder as raison d'etre for the volume: "We have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history." Tonight at the Arizona picks up, circa 2007, where these ideas left off, but whether the digital listening world is ready for the dive into stirring acoustic/myth-poetical consciousness that marks Tonight at the Arizona is another story. As to the Felice Brothers themselves, they seem all too aware of the twisting gyres of myth and history (and of their own predecessors) and have fashioned a wonderful album around that tension.
© Erik Hage /TiVo